The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it," Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as 'schrep', wrote on the Mozillazine blog.

...of software and hardware development is becoming more and more centered on the embedded space. No wonder Firefox want a peace of the pie.

I wonder if they can cut down the behemoth that is Firefox enough to compete with the like of Opera? Somehow, I get the feeling that, having witnessed the stellar rise of Firefox from the beginning, it won't take to long.

I wish some of the Linux distros would take the same approach. Microsoft has by no means dominated the mobile device world, the way they've dominated the desktop. Of course, getting a new OS onto a mobile device is a lot harder than getting a new application installed.

"I wonder if they can cut down the behemoth that is Firefox enough to compete with the like of Opera? Somehow, I get the feeling that, having witnessed the stellar rise of Firefox from the beginning, it won't take to long."

Now, quite frankly, would the mobile vendors please take their heads out of their rears and include decent amount of RAM on their devices? What's up with Nokia bundling odd numbers like 45MB on the E70 for example? And leaving at best 22MB of free RAM for applications. And the horrid memory leak that lowers this to 14MB after light usage of the S60 browser and a couple J2ME midlets?

I'd rather have abundant RAM and just enough builtin Flash to store the firmware and perhaps 8MB of user data, and have everything else go to a memory card. That's a tradeoff I'd gladly make. Make it mandatory to use 150X SD cards, I don't care! But the out-of-memory situation on most mobile devices is so damn annoying that I don't even know where to begin.

The Wii has 31% less RAM (and I'm being really nice to Nokia by including the Wii's video RAM on this calculation) than the revised 8GB Nokia N95, and yet it's capable of so much more. The Internet Channel Opera doesn't bomb out of memory nearly as frequently as Symbian versions. And ARM machine code is so much denser than PPC's. This points squarely to Symbian's inefficiency at handling memory.

This said, I believe Firefox has nowhere to go but Pocket PCs. Symbian is a dead end. It can't handle this kind of stuff.

Unless they go Opera Mini's route and offload most of the DOM processing to an intermediate server, and only deals with presenting constructed, laid out pages. They won't need anything more than a Cairo canvas and a stream of drawing instructions, and some interpreter to handle transformed Javascript code. But that rings as a 3rd party opportunity, no?